Feature Article |
Miss Popularity
By Jessica Pressler
Indeed. Whenever an article appears about women in publishing, in Publishers Weekly or on someone's blog, it's almost guaranteed that by the end of the day, Weiner will have weighed in on it.
It's for the same reason that she slips poems into her books — Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse" and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" appear in their entirety in Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, respectively. Like Oprah, who assigned Faulkner to the masses this past spring, Weiner's trying to show that being popular doesn't mean you can't also be a Brain. "I keep trying to not take part in the whole [chick-lit] debate, because I find it stupid and reductive," she says. Still, the Number One Hit Song blog post hit a nerve. "I'm a symbol of anachronistic family values? What about Salman Rushdie, whose wedding was in InStyle?"
Sometimes Weiner's cheerful bitterness just sounds bitter: She smacks down her critics, calling people who question chick lit's literary merit, among other things, "writers who can't get published and have determined that this is somehow Sophie Kinsella's fault," Kinsella being the mega-selling British author of the Shopaholic series. And Weiner is confessional to a fault: At Pasión, she mentions to me that she decided not to cooperate with Alex Witchel of the New York Times Magazine, who was scheduled to profile her, because she feared Witchel had a preconceived point of view: "Her attitude was very much, if you want to have a successful book you have to, like, whore yourself and put your whole life out on the weblog, and that's what makes your book successful. And I was like, but it's not true — I don't put my whole life out there. I make very conscious choices about what I write and what I don't write and what I say and when I say it. She had a book that came out when Good in Bed did, and it didn't do as well," Weiner says meaningfully. "After I told her I didn't feel comfortable, and I wasn't going to go ahead with it, she started, like, whining about, well — crying, like, 'My editor's going to be really mad.'" (Witchel declined to comment about Weiner; Witchel's novel, Me Times Three, was published in six foreign languages and optioned by Miramax.)
Meanwhile, the most notable catfight of the year was this past June, after Curtis Sittenfeld, the female author of the well-reviewed novel Prep, wrote a critical review of The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank. In it, she mused that "saying that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut." Weiner, who had reviewed Banks's book favorably in Entertainment Weekly, wrote a line-by-line rebuttal to Sittenfeld's, with added commentary. "The more I think about the review,"she wrote, "the more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you, to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order."
The would-be literary feud caught the attention of the New York Observer. "It ended up being an 800-word exercise in showing how smart she is," Weiner told the pink paper. "It's like, we know you went to Stanford, we know you won the Seventeen fiction contest, because every single article I've read about you manages to get that in there." Me-ow . Sittenfeld declined to comment for both the Observer and this article, though her publicist at Random House adds, "We're just hoping Jennifer's actions speak for themselves."
What's obvious to those watching is that if anyone's playing the high-school game, it's Weiner, who, after the Observer story ran, mentioned Sittenfeld in yet another post, one that was later deleted: "I am going to make Curtis Sittenfeld sorry that her keyboard has the letters 's' 'l' 'u' and 't,'" she wrote. Norman Mailer's fistfights, as told to the digital age.
It's for the same reason that she slips poems into her books — Philip Larkin's "This Be the Verse" and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" appear in their entirety in Good in Bed and In Her Shoes, respectively. Like Oprah, who assigned Faulkner to the masses this past spring, Weiner's trying to show that being popular doesn't mean you can't also be a Brain. "I keep trying to not take part in the whole [chick-lit] debate, because I find it stupid and reductive," she says. Still, the Number One Hit Song blog post hit a nerve. "I'm a symbol of anachronistic family values? What about Salman Rushdie, whose wedding was in InStyle?"
Sometimes Weiner's cheerful bitterness just sounds bitter: She smacks down her critics, calling people who question chick lit's literary merit, among other things, "writers who can't get published and have determined that this is somehow Sophie Kinsella's fault," Kinsella being the mega-selling British author of the Shopaholic series. And Weiner is confessional to a fault: At Pasión, she mentions to me that she decided not to cooperate with Alex Witchel of the New York Times Magazine, who was scheduled to profile her, because she feared Witchel had a preconceived point of view: "Her attitude was very much, if you want to have a successful book you have to, like, whore yourself and put your whole life out on the weblog, and that's what makes your book successful. And I was like, but it's not true — I don't put my whole life out there. I make very conscious choices about what I write and what I don't write and what I say and when I say it. She had a book that came out when Good in Bed did, and it didn't do as well," Weiner says meaningfully. "After I told her I didn't feel comfortable, and I wasn't going to go ahead with it, she started, like, whining about, well — crying, like, 'My editor's going to be really mad.'" (Witchel declined to comment about Weiner; Witchel's novel, Me Times Three, was published in six foreign languages and optioned by Miramax.)
Meanwhile, the most notable catfight of the year was this past June, after Curtis Sittenfeld, the female author of the well-reviewed novel Prep, wrote a critical review of The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank. In it, she mused that "saying that another woman's ostensibly literary novel is chick lit feels catty, not unlike calling another woman a slut." Weiner, who had reviewed Banks's book favorably in Entertainment Weekly, wrote a line-by-line rebuttal to Sittenfeld's, with added commentary. "The more I think about the review,"she wrote, "the more I think about the increasingly angry divide between ladies who write literature and chicks who write chick lit, the more it seems like a grown-up version of the smart versus pretty games of years ago; like so much jockeying for position in the cafeteria and mocking the girls who are nerdier/sluttier/stupider than you, to make yourself feel more secure about your own place in the pecking order."
The would-be literary feud caught the attention of the New York Observer. "It ended up being an 800-word exercise in showing how smart she is," Weiner told the pink paper. "It's like, we know you went to Stanford, we know you won the Seventeen fiction contest, because every single article I've read about you manages to get that in there." Me-ow . Sittenfeld declined to comment for both the Observer and this article, though her publicist at Random House adds, "We're just hoping Jennifer's actions speak for themselves."
What's obvious to those watching is that if anyone's playing the high-school game, it's Weiner, who, after the Observer story ran, mentioned Sittenfeld in yet another post, one that was later deleted: "I am going to make Curtis Sittenfeld sorry that her keyboard has the letters 's' 'l' 'u' and 't,'" she wrote. Norman Mailer's fistfights, as told to the digital age.
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